Vol. 4.3, March 1972

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME IV, NO. 3	March, 1972	75¢

THE PARTY

When I was a kid growing up in New York I noticed that many of the adults I met were want to refer in awed and reverent terms to “the Party”. It was not clear whether they were members of “the Party” or not but it was clear that this organization was the central focus of their lives. At the time I thought that they were just unusually fervid Democrats; it was quite a while before I realized that they were speaking of the Communist Party. Now the New York Times has printed a lengthy article about a Libertarian Party that has been formed in Colorado, a Party planning to hold a convention and run a Presidential ticket this year. (Anthony Ripley, “New Party Makes a Debut In Denver”, New York Times, Feb. 6). The question arises: do we have ourselves a Party? And if we do, or even if we don’t, do we want one?

Whether we have ourselves a Party may be gleaned from some simple facts, culled from the Ripley article and from the LP’s literature. According to Ripley, temporary national chairman of the party, David F. Nolan asserts that total nationwide membership is now 250, though the party “hopes” to have 1,000 members by the national convention in June and 10,000 members by Election Day. The party’s literature states that it has only one state chairman (in Colorado) and advertises for people to sign on as state chairmen. The L. P. conducted a nationwide poll of its membership to ask whom they would like to see run for President of the United States. Your editor came in first in the poll, thus becoming the runaway plurality choice of the 52 people who participated in the voting. The L. P. called on all of its members to swamp me with a nationwide letter and card-writing campaign urging me to run for President. A deluge of 5 letters and calls came flooding in.

Do we have a party and is it equipped to run a Presidential campaign? Surely the above facts speak eloquently for themselves. Apart from ideology, which we can table for the moment, what any party needs to run a nationwide campaign are two vital elements: lots of party workers, and lots of money. A party possessing 52 active members and one state chairman clearly has almost none of either crucial requisite.

To clear away the personal question first, while I am of course honored to be the first choice for the Presidency I have, to put it with extreme mildness, no ambitions for higher office. Indeed, even if the party had 100,000 members and $1 million in its coffers, I can only repeat the famous phrase of General Sherman: “If nominated I shall not run; if elected I shall not serve.”

To return to the problem of the party, it is distressing that the dedicated young Coloradoans” who constitute the L. P. do not seem to realize that the chances of getting any of their desired luminaries (e.g. Alan Greenspan, Ernie Fitzgerald) to run for President are zero as well. 52 activists do not a party make. Even the Peace and Freedom Party, which had 100,000 signatories and 10,000 activists in party clubs throughout California in early 1968, collapsed very quickly even in California and never really got beyond the bounds of that state.

If the New Left, with an enormously greater reservoir of resources in money and manpower, has never been able to get a party off the ground, it should be crystal clear that the time is scarcely at hand for a libertarian political party. To add to the problem, the growing but still relatively miniscule number of developed libertarians are so individualistic, by the very nature of their creed, that they have scarcely been able to form ad hoc organizations, let alone a disciplined party which, according to Mr. Nolan, “will require its candidates to sign specific pledges”, presumably to cleave to the party platform. Apart from that, a large majority of libertarians, for varying reasons, are opposed to any sort of participation in the political process, so that the greater number of potential supporters would have nothing to do with such a party in any case.

It should be clear that, at the very least, any talk of a libertarian party is grossly premature, and will be for many years to come. If the L. P. is determined to go ahead in any case, then surely the sensible thing for it to do would be to start small, in keeping with their resources, and stick to grass-roots organizing in Colorado. Not only is Colorado the center, if not the only area of strength, for the party, but the extremely liberal electoral laws of that state require only 300 signatures on the ballot. Let the party run, say, Mr. Nolan for the Senate this year and see what happens. If it can get 10% of the vote, then the time will come for the rest of the movement to re-evaluate its prospects. (Most minor parties remain at a dead end with something like 2-3% of the vote.)

Apart from the extreme unrealism of launching a Libertarian Party at this time, there are other considerations that give great pause even to those of us who are not opposed to participation in politics as a matter of principle. The libertarian movement has only recently begun to mature, and to develop a harmony and unity of purpose among its varied and disparate factions. The spectacle of a party convention with leftists, Randians, and half a dozen other factions at each others’ throats over platform and candidates is not one that can fill anyone devoted to the movement with delight. Furthermore, in the possible but unlikely event of healthy for the libertarian movement as a whole or for the cause that we are all trying to promote. There is also a good chance that the media will heap ridicule on a party whose reach is so much greater than its grasp, and this of course would be damaging to the greater cause as well, a great deal of publicity accruing to a party which represents only a small fraction of libertarians, most libertarians will feel called upon to take steps to dissociate themselves from a platform or candidates which do not reflect their views, either of Ideology or of strategy. None of this can be.

As to the temporary platform of the party, there are, as one would expect, some very good things in it, ranging from repeal of all “crimes without victims” to abolition of the draft to repeal of the various regulatory agencies to asserting the right of secession and immediate withdrawal from Indochina. There are, however, some glaring clinkers in the platform, even conceding that these are “transitional” demands rather than an immediate call for the full and complete libertarian program. The major clinkers are in the vital fields of: taxation, money, and foreign and military policy.

In the crucial area of taxation, the party platform confines itself to the admirable though minor call for ending the discrimination against single persons in the income tax system, and to a vague request for some sort of reduction of taxation and government expenditures. Surely, at the very minimum any sort of party calling itself libertarian must call for (a) an immediate and drastic reduction in taxation — let’s say 50% across the board to begin with; and (b) immediate repeal of the income tax, the despotic and critical key to the federal revenue system. Failing repeal of the income tax, a libertarian party should at least call for repeal of the withholding system, which came in as a wartime “emergency” measure in World War II, and is the key to any large scale depredations through the income tax. The curious thing is that Nr. Nolan was formerly head of the Youth division of the Liberty Amendment Committee, which made its prime plank repeal of the income tax. As such, Nr. Nolan, at least, should be alive to the importance of abolishing the income tax system. As a matter of fact, the party could well include the other plank of the Liberty Amendment group: a constitutional amendment which would abolish all government activities that compete with private enterprise. Where is this plank? Is a Libertarian Party to fall behind the Liberty Amendment Committee in the extent of its libertarianism?

In the field of money, there is also a grave falling away from the pure libertarian creed. While the party does look forward to eventual abolition of the Federal Reserve System, its concrete monetary program is disquietingly Friedmanite: it calls, for example, for the right of private persons to own gold. Fine, but scarcely enough for a libertarian vanguard. Where is a plea for a return to the gold standard, or more precisely for a return to the people of the billions of dollars of gold that the federal government confiscated from us in 1933 as a “depression emergency”? In addition to the simple right to own gold, we should also have the right to get our gold back from the government’s hoard; and this means gold redemption, once again, from the presently government-dictated and controlled fiat dollar. In Friedmanite fashion, the Libertarian Party would leave total control of our money supply in the hands of government and its fiat paper currency. Similarly, in the international monetary field, the party calls for freely fluctuating exchange rates, again a venerable Friedmanite panacea. Once again, the desideratum is for gold to be the money in international affairs as well, a policy which Western Europe at least would be happy to agree with. Is the Libertarian Party to be significantly less libertarian than Jacques Rueff or the Bank of South Africa?

Even more disquieting is the party’s position on military and foreign affairs. While it does happily advocate immediate withdrawal from Indochina and the United Nations, and an end to foreign aid and to “attempts to act as a policeman for the world”, this policy of “isolationism” is negated by the party’s call for continuing military alliance with the Western “democracies.” Thus, we are to keep a military alliance with “democratic” England, which is still persisting in its age-old imperialist policy of shooting unarmed Irishmen. Furthermore, there is no recognition in the party platform of the evils of domestic militarism and of the “military-industrial complex”, and the party calls upon us to retain our nuclear deterrent. There is no hint of enthusiasm for any sort of disarmament, even for joint disarmament with unlimited inspection. Nineteenth-century classical liberalism was wrecked largely by its failure to break with militarism and foreign interventionism, and the Libertarian Party shows no real signs of fully surmounting this age-old handicap.

There are also no attempts to cope with some of the major problems rightly agitating millions of Americans: the crises in welfare, education, pollution, urban affairs, etc. But, as we have indicated, deficiencies in their platform is only one of the problems that confront the Libertarian Party. Genuine progress can only come from taking one step at a time.

The Shaffer Dictionary

By Butler Shaffer

The following definitions — comprise a part of my view of reality, in all its humorous — and often frustrating — manner.

BUREAUCRACY: a practice of requiring that ten copies of every government form be filed in order to justify the hiring of additional government employees to handle the increased work.

RED TAPE: what bureaucrats engage in between legal holidays.

TRAITOR: one whose unquestioning loyalty to the government is not as unquestioning as mine.

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES: a group of men who clearly recognize that freedom cannot exist so long as witches are permitted to run about.

PEACE: a failure of governments to function properly.

DRAFT: a compulsory system of slavery in which young men are forced, under penalty of imprisonment, to jeopardize their lives in order to preserve their freedom.

TARIFFS: restrictions placed on the importation of foreign goods for the protection of domestic producers, so as to enhance their profitability thus enabling them to pay the taxes necessary for the support of foreign aid programs which provide assistance to those nations which cannot sell their goods in this country.

PROFITEER: a despicable man getting rich by doing things which I wish I had thought of first.

LAISSEZ-FAIRE

Those who wave the sword Of human benevolence Forget its sharpness.

— Jack Wright

The Rising Sun

By Leonard P. Liggio

The major Nixon Counter-Revolution of mid-August 1971 was a possibly fatal act of violence domestically; less well-known are the foreign affairs implications of the Nixon Counter-Revolution. The unpublicized remarks of the central figures of Nixon-finance regarding international relations may indicate the most dangerous aspects of all in the administration’s long-run strategy. The greatest violence was directed against Japanese business as the principal cause of the monetary disarray in which the American Treasury found itself publicly exposed during 1971. Their attitude was revealed by a remark that American monetary problems, as well as the Nixon administration’s many other problems, could be solved if only the Japanese once again could be manuevered into a second attack on Pearl Harbor. The United States gained an additional quarter century of international financial dominance by its success in bringing about a war with the Japanese. Even if only another decade could be gained by another war, think what the American Treasury might be ready to risk. Anyone interested in further background regarding the origin of the United States intervention in the second world war should consult the recently published book by Richard Minear, Victors’ Justice, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press). The most important source on that matter is the work edited by the late Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.

The Nixon administration’s singling out of Japan as Enemy Number One came as a surprise to those who had not understood the long-run conflicts that have been basic to the economic development of the United States and Japan. These economic conflicts lead to political and military conflicts. The lead editorial in the New York Times, January 11, 1972, “U.S.-Japan: Summit or Nadir?” summarized some of the issues:

But the limited results of the Nixon-Sato meeting in San Clemente suggest that in Japan’s case, the malaise stirred by last year’s “Nixon shocks” will not be quickly dissipated . . . The crux of the problem is that the United States for a quarter-century has been the fixed sun around which Japan has revolved. That sun now has moved. The certainty that it will be in its place every morning is gone. Japan’s concept of a benevolent America, acting in the common interest, has been fundamentally altered. Mr. Nixon last summer announced the opening of an era of rivalry with America’s allies in West Europe and Japan, coinciding with his “era of negotiations” with the rivals of the past, Russia and China. He began to talk of promoting American interests first and to act in the same way — on pocket-book as well as political issues abroad. Tokyo, as a result, has begun to talk about and grope for a revival of a Japan-centered foreign policy.

The Times reported that Premier Sato’s “economic aides are moving to reduce Japan’s dependence on the United States and the dollar. They have announced plans for a “yen settlements union,” a kind of yen bloc in Asia that faintly recalls the World War II Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

Alongside the basic international monetary conflicts between the dollar and the yen, there has been the strong Nixon administration opposition to free competition between Japan and the United States in regard to textiles, electronics, steel, etc. In late January, Tadayoshi Yamada, permanent executive counsel of the Nippon Steel Corporation, representing Japan’s steel makers in negotiations with the U.S. State Dept., confirmed a three year agreement to reduce Japan’s steel exports to U.S. American steel makers complained that the previous three agreements had allowed too great a freedom to Japanese exporters. In the earlier agreement Japanese exporters were permitted an overall growth rate of 5 percent a year. However, within those limits Japanese exporters sold Americans high-priced specialty steel products at a total 50 percent above the earlier level. In the new agreement there is provision for only a 2.5 percent yearly growth, for a banning of shifts of unused quotas from one category to another, for specific quotas for stainless steels, tool steels, alloy steels, etc., and for an annual reduction in the quota for specialty steels. Finally, the Japanese must limit exports to West Coast United States to one third of their quotas. Under the previous agreement, Japan’s steel export was strongest to the West Coast due to major shortages in U.S. steel production; and U.S. firms felt deprived of the vastly higher prices they could have gained in the shortage period but for Japanese competition. (In Europe, Japanese steel competition is being met with increased concentration in the steel industry. When in January the formation of a German-Dutch steel trust, the second largest on the continent, was announced, it was said by one of the executives “I don’t think it would be unfitting” to call the new company, the “Anti-Japan Company.”

These agreements represent a major deterioration of Japanese relations with the United States because they result from the Nixon administration’s threat to establish extremely harsh restrictions of trade against Japanese products. In seeking alternative major markets, the Japanese foreign ministry in January indicated pleasure at the prospect of vastly increased trade with the People’s Republic of China. Major trade between Japan and China was begun in the 1950’s through the sending of a Japanese prince, deeply interested in Chinese “culture, to be a permanent resident of Peking. Thus, although no diplomatic relations existed due to United States pressure, in Japanese eyes, the residence in Peking of this prince was of equal importance, and he was the host to the many trade delegation from Japan that visited China. Trade with China was carried on through numerous “friendly” trading companies which Japanese firms established for this purpose to avoid American displeasure.

However, the United States pressured the Japanese government to place so many restrictions on Japanese trade with China that Japanese exports to China stabilized at over a half billion dollars a year. The United States wished Japanese business to direct its energies to light industrial products for sale to South-east Asia (where the U.S. wished Japan to play a military role also) rather than the heavy industrial products for the China market. Thus, the South-east Asian economies were viewed as necessary for keeping Japan in the junior partner role which the U.S. wanted for it rather than as an independent world trader President Eisenhower, in his “falling dominoes” press conference of April 7, 1954, while the question of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam hung in the balance, indicated the relationship between Vietnam policy and American aims for Japanese dependence: “It (successful Vietnam revolution) takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place in the world to go — that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live. So, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.” In the spring of 1955, explaining the increasing United States intervention in Vietnam, Secretary of State Dulles indicated that America’s reasons included creating economic opportunity for Japanese light industries — “there is a good chance of Japanese textile goods, for instance, moving into Indo-China.” But, Japanese heavy industry developed despite America’s plans for Japan, and the restrictions imposed by the United States on Japan’s exports make China the logical market for Japan. In 1972 China indicated that it wished to send trade missions to Japan to discuss trade with the steel, shipbuilding, electronics, automotive and railway industries.

China has indicated that automobile and railway trade are first on their list. China would like to establish the railway technology that has made Japan’s railway system the most advanced in the world. World interest has centered on the high-speed trains on the New Tokaido Line, where trains average one hundred miles an hour between Tokyo and Osaka. The Japanese foreign ministry welcomed China’s initiatives for it had been redefining Japanese policy toward China and had drafted a paper setting forth Japan’s three principles for establishing formal diplomatic relations. These principles are: “that the People’s Republic is the sole legitimate Government of China, that Taiwan belongs to China, and that the question of Japan’s peace treaty with the Chinese Nationalist regime on Taiwan (that is, its abrogation) is to be dealt with in the course of government-level negotiations between Japan and China.” Japan has also initiated major trade relations with North Korea.

The present nadir of U.S.-Japan relations is the result of the sharp contradiction between American aims for Japan as its junior economic and military partner and Japanese desires for economic independence (read competitiveness) and a military position in Asia much smaller than desired by the United States for Japan. In the military area, Japan was seen as playing an active role in future ‘local’ Asian wars, with the United States merely providing the money and equipment, so that the U.S. would not suffer the domestic crisis which has accompanied the Vietnam intervention. The Nixon doctrine represented the most explicit statement of this objective. Thus, Nixon’s anti-competitive monetary and trade policies were accompanied by pressures on Japan to re-militarize. The interrelationship of these two policies, of course, is that re-militarization is very expensive and would require large increases in Japanese taxation, thereby greatly reducing the competitive and monetary advantages Japan has enjoyed. (Any study of American monetary and trade decline in the last thirty years would require centering on the taxation and expenditures of the military budget.)

American policy toward Japan has been prefigured in the analyses of former ambassador and Harvard professor Edwin Reischauer over a period of two decades. “In an industrialized country, Japan has the factory power which generates modern military strength,” Reischauer noted in a 1950 essay for the Foreign Policy Association. “Although far weaker industrially than Western Europe, the United States or the Soviet Union,” he continued, “Japan is still the only other centre capable of producing significant military power today, and it is militarily all the more important because of its isolation from the other great industrial nations. Japan, therefore, is an area of major military significance, an area which, if it were to shift sides, could appreciably alter the balance of power in the world.” Reischauer in an article in Foreign Affairs (January, 1967) looked forward to the implementation of a new self-consciousness by the Japanese in military policy: “a close partnership with the United States, including a defense relationship, is seen to be greatly in Japan’s interests, and not an undesirable situation forced on Japan by American might or historical accident.”

During a Japanese-American conference at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in January 1969, Reischauer said: “Without bases in Japan and the support of Japanese economic power and technical skills, the United States could not have done what it has in East Asia during the past two decades.” In response former Japanese foreign minister, Aiichiro Fujiyama replied: “I do not believe that a United States military withdrawal from the Far East would necessarily precipitate an outbreak of fighting. Nor do I believe that renewed hostilities on the Korean peninsula would inevitably spread into an all-out war. If the elements that can cause war are present and are not resolved, fighting will resume regardless of the American presence, but I do not believe that present conditions will lead to such an impasse. Although American military aid to South Korea helps to keep the situation inflamed, the Chinese and the Soviet Union have withdrawn the active support from North Korea that brought about a major confrontation in 1950 . . . I could not bring myself personally to approve a continuing American military presence in Asia, and I do not think that China would ever voluntarily accept it.” Suji Kurauchi (Director of Japan’s House Committee on Foreign Affairs) concluded by noting widespread Japanese fears “that the United States is grooming Japan for a military role in Asia similar to the one it expects West Germany to play in Europe . . . Many Japanese fear that as the United States moves to make Japan its successor as the policeman of the Pacific, rearmament will naturally follow.”

This role of Japan as Pacific policeman became central to American objectives with the impact of the intervention in Vietnam. In the period” immediately preceding the January 1968 TET Offensive, U.S. pressure on Premier Sato intensified, and he travelled in South-east Asia to prepare opinion for an increased Japanese support of the United States. A press offensive was launched in the U.S. by official academics in favor of Japanese remilitarization, and deepest regret was expressed that until then “in political affairs abroad, she has remained largely inactive if not frankly isolationist.” The November 1969 Washington meeting of Premier Sato with Nixon was the culmination of a campaign for a new foreign policy for Japan based on rearmament. In his policy speech to the Diet on February 14, 1970, Premier Sato declared that the nineteen-seventies would be a decade during which Japan’s power would grow to carry “unprecedented weight in world affairs.” However, there developed strong but unpublicized opposition to this policy in the majority Liberal-Democratic party which is composed of many factions. In addition, the Defense Agency which is the center for pressure for re-militiarization is unable to apply full pressure because officials from the Ministry of Finance hold high positions in the Defense Agency and they are strongly opposed to policies which will increase the tax burden and reduce Japan’s competitive advantage in world trade. Thus, Premier Sato during 1970 was forced to reverse the pressure to create a climate of public opinion favorable to remilitarization. He denied the goal of “great-powerism” as well as the fears that “with her expanding national strength and rising nationalism, Japan might well behave in such a way as to disturb the international equilibrium . . . It is entirely a new case that a country such as Japan, possessing great economic strength, has no significant military power and yet makes its presence felt throughout the world.”

Japan has become the world’s third largest industrial power after the United States and the Soviet Union. It has gained the position from which it could transform its present satellite role into economic independence, if partnership with the United States did not provide an area of economic growth. The time has come when the United States has failed Japan’s needs in the economic, monetary and trade areas and Japan is establishing its economic independence of the United States. A self-directed and self-confident Japan may be the natural result of Japan’s economic independence. Vastly increased trade with China would be one aspect of that development. There has also been a large expansion of Japanese investment in Siberia. Joint Soviet-Japanese companies have been developing timber, mineral, water, and transport facilities in Siberia. Siberia is a major source of raw materials for Japan. A recent example results from the decline in American production of coking coal, the importation of which was central to Japan’s steel industry. The Soviet Union is building a 270-mile railroad to connect with the Trans-Siberian railroad from Chulman coal fields in the Yakut Republic of the USSR and which might extend to the Aldan coal center further north. The river and rail transport in Siberia and the short distance over the Sea of Japan from Vladivostok makes that area attractive to Japan as a raw material supplier. Consortia of Japanese firms and banks are investing heavily in Alaska, especially in timber, pulp mills, iron, coal, copper, and pipelines and leases in the oil-rich North Slope of Alaska. Japan purchases almost 80% of the exports of Alaska. Almost half of British Columbia’s mineral output goes to Japan, along with timber, pulp and crude oil from the tar sand deposits.

Heavy Japanese investment has been placed in raw materials production in Australia, New Zealand and especially Indonesia. Japan is a member of the ten-nation consortium called the Amsterdam Group which re-financed Indonesia’s three billion dollar debt. Japan generally contributed a third of the total amount of the re-financing. (A good recent study on this and similar matters is Teresa Hayter, Aid as Imperialism, Penguin Paperbacks, 1971; also see, Bruce Nissen, “The World Bank: A Political Institution,” Pacific Research & World Empire Telegram, Vol. II, Number 6, September-October 1971, pp. 9-23, from Pacific Studies Center, 1963 University Ave. East Palo Alto, California 94303. Another important source of information on the Far East is: Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Building 600 T, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.) Japan is especially anxious to develop the oil production of Alaska’s North Slope and of Indonesia, and has made major oil discoveries in the southern Ryukyuan island chain about 100 miles north-east of Taiwan on the edge of China’s continental shelf (50 miles from the mainland). A UN economic study indicates there might be more than 15 billion metric tons of oil in this off-shore field. At present more than 90% of Japan’s oil imports come from the Middle East through the narrow and shallow Strait of Malacca, between Malaya and Sumatra, connecting the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The shallowness of the passage makes the use of the famous Japanese-built super-tankers quite difficult. Britain has begun its withdrawal from the Indian Ocean as a defense interest. The United States had embarked on a large build-up in its naval interest in the Indian Ocean, and the Soviet Union has promised to match any United States naval plans there. The recent American naval activity in the Indian Ocean regarding the developments in Bengal relate to those plans. Thus, Japan, which has never maintained any peacetime naval forces beyond the Pacific Ocean, and is limiting itself to the North Pacific, finds the Indian Ocean route less than satisfactory and welcomes the development of oil resources within the Pacific Ocean itself. The Pacific Ocean’s depth and expanse make it especially suitable for using Japan’s super-tanker fleet. (FORTUNE magazine is a good source of economic information regarding Japan; especially useful are the issues of July, 1957, July, 1963 and September, 1970.)

During the 1960’s Japan extended its markets and supply sources to all parts of the world, tripling its gross national product. This was accomplished through an almost total political isolation or invisibility. Presently, the deeply sensitive Japanese are anxious and distraught over the humiliating treatment they have been receiving from the Nixon administration. They have not been consulted on major diplomatic matters which directly concern them. They have seen major US monetary policies directed against them. “They also sense an underlying American antagonism that they fear is rooted in racial prejudice.” (New York Times, January 6). “Yet, in one of those paradoxes that are the mark of Japan in Western eyes, the Japanese are showing greater personal and national self-confidence than in previous years. There is a sense of National pride in Japanese accomplishments, particularly in the visible results of the “economic miracle.” (Ibid.) If this self-confidence continues, Japan will eschew any of the military and political roles which the United States wishes to impose on it. In addition to its international economic role, any sense of mission will be best directed internally. “Most of the problems of foreign relations before us cannot be solved without taking proper action in domestic policy,” a recent official statement emphasized; “in brief, the Japanese people are now expected to show the world their sense of responsibility and power of original thinking, which should accompany their growth.”

The Political Circus

McGovern as Hatchet-Man.

It is high time to revise the universal view of George McGovern as a sincere, likable, Mr. Nice Guy. For the McGovern forces are increasingly playing the role of hatchet-men, hacking away at everyone else on the “left” competing for the same constituency. While this of course is standard political practice, it hardly squares with the Nice Guy image.

In New York, the McGovern forces have been slashing away at the horrendous record of Mayor Lindsay, and here they are playing an amusing and worthwhile role, if hardly gentlemanly. But the situation is more serious in New Hampshire, where the McGovern people have been bitterly attacking Rep. Paul McCloskey, for fear that the anti-war youth and independents will flock to the Republican primary. As the McCloskey people have been pointing out in rebuttal, for a sincere anti-war person this is terribly self-defeating strategy, since a strong showing by Pete McCloskey in the New Hampshire primary could have an immediate and vital impact in ending the war in Vietnam. For the anti-war, dump-Nixon forces, the first order of business is to ravage him in the Republican primaries, to show that Nixon has no mandate, and has lost the support of even the Republican voters. McGovern’s hatchet role is not only unworthy, it calls sharply into question his allegedly superior “sincerity” as compared to the other candidates in the field. Indeed, Pete McCloskey has shown high courage in early going into lone opposition to a President of his own party.

As icing on the cake, the McGovern forces have been attacking McCloskey on the grounds that he has not shown enough commitment to “progressive domestic policy and legislation.” (New York Times, Feb. 6) Apparently, McCloskey dared to vote against increased federal health and housing appropriations, for example. For libertarians the information that McCloskey is not nearly as socialistic as McGovern is hardly calculated to swing us into the McGovern camp.

“Hinceforth th’ policy iv this gover’mint will be, as befure, not to bully a sthrong power or wrong a weak, but will remain thrue to th’ principle iv wrongin’ th’ sthrong an’ bullyin’ th’ weak.” — Mr. Dooley.

From The Old Curmudgeon

Mod Psychology. The California Libertarian Alliance, in its eternal quest for the hip and the mod, has now latched on to “humanist” psychology. On our desk is an announcement of the first major Libertarian Conference in the Los Angeles area in over a year, geared to the theme of “The Psychology of Freedom”, and held on Feb. 12-13. The Conference is exploring the alleged “similarities between the humanists and the libertarians” and an “analysis of the humanist vs. the behaviorist schools.”

Apart from the valiant battle of Dr. Thomas Szasz (a speaker at the November, 1970 Libertarian Conference in L. A.) against compulsory commitment of mental patients, and the interesting researches of Sharon Presley into the personalities and attitudes of different wings of libertarians, it is difficult to see any relation whatsoever between psychology and libertarianism. Psychology is designed to help people, to aid individuals in achieving their goals? Well, so are a lot of other things, including penicillin and bone surgery, driver-education and Berlitz. So what? No one has yet presumed to organize campaigns for these good things on behalf of “libertarianism.” It is high time that libertarians heeded the justly famous article of Professor Walter Grinder, reprinted in the December issue of The Abolitionist (“What Is A Libertarian?”, pp. 5-8, available for 36¢ from P.O. Box 14, Verona, N. J. 07044). Grinder wrote: “Lately, we hear more and more about the ‘libertarian’ life style. The praises of the ‘libertarian’ mind opening experiences of grass and acid are unending . . . Some or all of these activities may very well have positive merit and increase the desirability of living. I am not passing judgment on any of them except to say that they have as much to do with libertarianism as, say, playing checkers or being particularly fond of the concertos of Rachmaninoff . . . So if those who are circulating the spurious myth that an ‘if it feels good, do it’ life style is essential to libertarianism will cease in their assertions, I will not engage in the propagation of the equally preposterous ‘libertarian’ symbiotic relationship between liberty and the game of checkers.” (p. 6) The same can be said of psychology as a whole or any of the schools thereof.

There is a further problem in libertarians’ identifying with any particular branch of psychology. If is be a science, psychology is somewhere in the infant state, and to hitch our wagon to one particular star is equivalent to 18th century libertarians identifying themselves with the phlogiston theory. Furthermore, there is nothing at all about “humanism” that is more libertarian or even more individualist than any other school of psychology or psychotherapy. It is absurd to say that psychoanalysis, for example, is any less libertarian than humanism — Dr. Szasz, for example, is a psychoanalyst. And neither can the much reviled behaviorism be brusquely discarded; there is an enormous difference between the totalitarian politics of B. F. Skinner and behavior therapy as a psychological method between therapist and patient. The insights of behavior therapy, in fact, are now being used by all schools of psychotherapists. (Not of course that I am trying to claim that libertarians as such should advocate behavior therapy!)

So come on, fellas; or are we going to be treated next year to a Conference on the “New Libertarian Astronomy?”

“The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.”

— Thomas Paine.

The Lone Eagle

Review of The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970) By Justus D. Doenecke

He was always a loner, the man called Slim, and yet in his own way he has always felt secure. Surely, his inner confidence was phenomenal, and could convey to the casual onlooker the false sense of placidity. While Charles A. Lindbergh never finished college, he was widely-read, and the simple writing style shown here in his war diaries bears its own eloquence of dignity and restraint. A single act of heroism had catapulted him to the status of the world’s foremost pioneer of flight. Yet he always retained a love of the soil, hating the blights technology made upon the landscape.

To understand Lindbergh, one must comprehend an aviator who could still say, “This hour I rode the sky like a god, but after it was over, how glad I would be to go back to earth and live among men, to feel the soil under my feet and to be smaller than the mountains and the trees” (p. 222). Annual retreats to the wilderness were essential, for only there could he gain “the strength that comes from solitude and distance and starlight nights” (p. 359). Cities were centers of “unhappiness and uninspired drabness,” whose “tension and turmoil” one could feel while flying 5,000 feet above (p. 450).

The son of a populist congressman, and the husband of a sensitive and poetic heiress, Lindbergh held to a Jeffersonian concept of a natural aristocracy rooted in the land. Mass culture — as reflected in the tabloid press, popular novels, the cinema — generated “the decline in character that is obvious in the nation today” (pp. 534, 601). Modern art was both “diseased and perverted” (p. 149). The Lone Eagle even felt alienation from his neighbors on Long Island Sound, and his reflection could almost have been made by Nick Carroway at the end of The Great Gatsby: “We get along with them without difficulty, but we do not understand their ways, and they do not understand ours — beyond that border line of superficiality which screens the depths of human character as a shore line screens a continent” (p. 262). Where, he wondered, could one find in America today “the character of the pioneer” and “the courage of the Revolutionary Army”? (p. 360)

His posture was martial. In a real sense, he was a militarist, finding military training essential for his own sons (“They must be taught how to fight well, to survive” — p. 10), as well as for such decaying nations as Great Britain (p. 163). Indulgent parents merely prevented their children from gaining the necessary “character and resourcefulness” (p. 521). Pacifism was folly.¹ War would always break out when nations differed on issues of “vital importance”. Yet, humanity must reduce its frequency by intelligent and mutually-beneficial agreements backed by sufficient force (p. 170). Said Lindbergh, himself a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, “Trust of one’s enemy should not pass far beyond knowledge of his actions” (p. 270). In his critique of Moral Rearmament, he stated, “I am not sure that peace and good will would make men happier if they had to be taken in excess” (p. 232). Even while speaking against American intervention, he noted that he would rather be flying with the air corp than “stumping the country with pacifists,” and mused, “If only the United States could be on the right side of an intelligent war” (emphasis his —p. 478).

Of all virtues, heroism is primary, and courage necessitates the continual facing of physical obstacles. “Is life so dear,” he reflected, “that we should blame men for dying in adventure . . . I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed” (p. 60). Indeed, he wanted personal foreknowledge of death, “the last, and possibly the greatest, adventure in life” (p. 297).

Yet any contest between Germany and Britain would be fratricidal, breeding chaos and communism while depriving Europe of her “best blood” (p. 78). The Colonel’s instincts were always Germanophile. “I cannot help liking the Germans,” he wrote in March, 1938. “They are like our own people. We should be working with them and not constantly crossing swords” (p. 5). Again, not long after endorsing the Munich Conference, Lindbergh commented, “The Germans are a great people . . . The future of Europe depends on the strength of this country” (p. 110). For in his eyes, it was “European Germany” which played the crucial role of holding back “Asiatic Russia” (p. 78).

German anti-Semitism was upsetting, particularly in a people so orderly and intelligent. Noting German resentment against supposed wealth secured by Jews during the inflation of the 1920s, he commented that the Germans “undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?” (p. 115). (It would have been interesting to have learned what to Lindbergh would have been involved in a “reasonable solution”). After observing the polgrom of November 10, 1938, and the viciously anti-Semitic propaganda films, the Lone Eagle claimed to understand Jewish bitterness (pp. 218,245). Still, it was far preferable to let Germany make a drive to the East than to risk any conflict. England’s sudden guarantee of Poland was shocking. There was no possible way to come to her aid, and chances for blundering into war were greatly expanded (p. 245). And, like Professor Alan John Percival Taylor twenty-two years later, Lindbergh found Danzig a spurious issue on which to fight a major war.

The flyer often compared German “virility” to British “decadence” (p. 498). A nation “losing ground” in both war and commerce, England was composed of “a great mass of slow, somewhat stupid and indifferent people (pp. 22,47). “Asleep too long,” she was facing a “loss of spirit and hope and spark, nearing the end of a great era, without more than vague realization, and with a sort of dazed complacency” (p. 161). In one sense, it was a time to mourn, for “A strong British Empire is essential to world stability” (p. 280). France, Lindbergh believed, was even worse: “a corrupt and demoralized nation” (p. 81).

Russia, in particular, met with the colonel’s scorn. While the Russian people were “open and lovable,” their social system could never work (p. 58). All communism was debilitating. Comparing bands of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and English Communists, Lindbergh commented, “It always seems that the Fascist group is better than the Communist group. Communism seems to draw the worst of men” (p. 75). Lindbergh must have found much, distasteful in American culture rooted in Communism, for he claimed that the model city on exhibit at the New York World’s Fair was merely one more example of “extremely subtle Communistic propaganda” (p. 398).

His public comments were often less reserved than his private ones. While he expressed the hope in his diary that Hitler would be wise enough to realize that he could dominate “all of the Eastern hemisphere without war” (p. 173), by March, 1940 he was telling readers of the Atlantic Monthly that Germany had “the right of an able and virile nation to expand.” The war, he declared, was between “different concepts of right” with the Allies representing “the static, legal ‘right’ of man,” the Germans “the dynamic forceful ‘right’ of nature.” Even in April, 1941, Lindbergh noted in his private journal that England and France bore more long-range responsibility for the war than did Germany (p. 479). A British victory would merely lead to the Bolshevization of Europe; American participation would guarantee “race riots, revolution, destruction at home” (pp. 420, 478)². A negotiated peace was imperative (p. 478). At one point he declared in a public speech that an agreement between America and Germany “could maintain civilization throughout the world” (address of August 4, 1940). Hitler’s Invasion of Russia fortified his anxieties. “I would,” he told an audience in San Francisco, “a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all her faults, than the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that exists in Soviet Russia” (address of July 2, 1941). The Germans had “faults,” the Russians were “barbaric”!

Lindbergh always shunned publicity, partly because of the circumstances surrounding the murder of his son, but in 1939, he threw himself into the heat of political conflict. War with Germany must be avoided if “Western Civilization” was to be preserved. His diary continually stressed the “Jewish interests” behind the prowar mass media, a group working hand-in-glove with the “intellectuals,” the “Anglophiles,” British agents, and “international financial interests” to betray a populace opposed to conflict (pp. 404, 481). He would come to their defense. The Colonel noted that America First rallies drew “a high type of people — better than a cross section of a community” (p. 532). Even those Manhattan dwellers who attended isolationist rallies were “far above the average of New York,” and hence “worth fighting for” (p. 552 —emphasis his).

In many ways, the sections dealing with the isolationist crusade are the most disappointing. Conversations with such people as John Foster Dulles are mentioned but not disclosed (p. 359). He mentions early strategy meetings with the backers of the right-wing Scribner’s Commentator, and his belief that Verne Marshall’s No Foreign War Committee might serve as the eastern counterpart to America First (p. 427), but fails to explain why he broke from the Marshall group (p. 440). He hints about “successful action in the Orient” (p. 412), but does not say what he means. One is curious about the degree to which Lindbergh’s racial doctrines were influenced by the French scientist, Dr. Alexis Carrel, or to what extent his geopolitical concepts were affected by Lawrence Dennis, an exponent of elitist corporatism. One also wonders if the bague Auden-like prose of his wife’s Wave of the Future (a book, incidentally, whose proceeds were to go to the American Friends Service Committee was ever clarified). When Lindbergh spoke in the November, 1939Reader’s Digest about securing “our White ramparts” from “Mongol and Persian and Moor,” did he have in mind Japan, Russia, or all of Asia? In the March, 1940 Atlantic piece he compares Russia’s eastward pressure to the Huns, but much still remains unclarified. And how does his anti-Japanese feeling coincide with his comment, made the day after Pearl Harbor, that the United States had been goading the Japanese? (“We have,” he said, “brought it on our own shoulders”, p. 561). Then there is the matter of his continual cries for rearmament. As the Lone Eagle kept emphasizing that the United States was safe from armed attack, one wonders whether or not he was envisioning a world policed by America in one sphere “Germany in another — a world which might perhaps see the end of “Asiatic” power?

Lindbergh fails to make clear why he did not return his Order of the German Eagle, or why he did not clarify his Des Moines speech in which he accused “Jewish groups” of fomenting war and asserted that only a peaceful America could remain racially tolerant. One biographer, more friendly to Lindbergh than most, declared that these words could either be interpreted as a threat or a prophetic insight, based upon first-hand observation of Nazi life.³ At any rate criticism came not only from such liberal non-interventionists as Chester Bowles, Philip Jessup and John T. Flynn, but from Herbert Hoover (who called it “an anti-Jewish speech”),⁴ the Chicago Tribune, and the Hearst papers. Bowles in particular wanted clarification, as he had urged Lindbergh to run for the Senate. In the eyes of the New York advertising executive, Lindbergh would be the “technological expert who can talk objectively and convincingly about the millions of Americans who lack the proper food, the numbers who lack the proper housing, the proper hospital care . . .”⁵

Other points need confirmation. If Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia was sympathetic to isolation, why did he not rally other southern conservatives? (pp. 261, 263) Did FDR really toy with offering Lindbergh a new cabinet post, Secretary for Air, in order to retain his silence? Did Lindbergh, as John Chamberlain claims, really go on a mission to Germany to rescue the Jews of Europe?⁶ In light of the superior maneuverability of the British Hurricanes and Spitfires to the Messerschmitt 109s, and in light of the shortage of fighters during the Battle of Britain, was not Lindbergh’s stress on the superiority of the German air-force overdone?

The last section of the book is in many ways the most revealing. Though believing that war would invariably result in the loss of freedom at home, the Colonel felt duty-bound to participate in the conflict, (pp. 566-7). Rejected by the Roosevelt Administration for military service, and receiving personal insults from Secretary of War Stimson concerning his “political views” and “lack of aggressiveness,” Lindbergh flew over fifty combat missions as a civilian test pilot. Here one of the world’s leading proponents of airpower becomes outraged over the impersonality of bombing. Not only does he equate the bombing of Cologne with Canterbury, but his own firsthand experience sobers him. “You press the trigger and death leaps forth,” he writes after one mission. “—4,200 projectiles a minute. Tracers bury themselves in wall and roof . . . Inside may be death or writhing agony. You never know” (p. 822). At one point he refuses to kill a possible enemy he sees from the air, noting the quiet courage in the man’s deliberate pace. “His bearing, his stride, his dignity — there is something in them that has formed a bond between us . . . I shall always remember his figure striding over the sand, the fearless dignity of his steps” (p. 821).

The air ace ‘is continually shocked by the callousness of American’ troops who would, according to Lindbergh, often shoot on sight Japanese prisoners desiring to surrender (pp. 880-1). American forces, he confessed, “have no respect for death, the courage of an enemy soldier, or many of the ordinary decencies of life” (p. 859). After witnessing the American conquest of Biak Island, he noted, “We hold his (the Japanese) examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts . . . for our people to kill by torture and to descend to throwing the bodies into a bomb crater and dumping garbage on them nauseates me” (pp. 880, 883). These aspects of the volume were ignored by reviewers of all political persuasions: as far as either the New York Review of Books, the New Republic or National Review is concerned, World War II must still be seen through Star-Spangled glasses.

Little wonder that when the Lone Eagle Visited the German Concentration Dora, he was reminded of the atrocities of the coral caves of Biak (p. 996).⁷ “It is not the Germans alone,” he wrote, “or the Japs, but the men of all nations to whom this war has brought shame and degradation” (p. 998). For some, such comparisons might be a grievous crime; for others, let us hope, it is the beginning of wisdom.

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¹ The Lone Eagle found little merit in the film, All Quiet on the Western Front, declaring, “It will not add to the courage of our country” (p. 277). Upon discovering that he liked the pacifist lobbyist Frederick J. Libby, he wrote that he found the Maine Quaker showing “unusual under-standing and intelligence (if one can apply the latter term to a pacifist)” (p. 320).

² In his introduction written in 1970, Lindbergh pointed with dismay to America’s “internal dissatisfaction and unrest,” as well as the breakdown of the British and French empires, and the menaces of Russia and China. Human losses are put, characteristically, in biological terms: “We lost the genetic heredity formed through aeons in many million lives.”

³ Walter S. Ross, The Last Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 317 Wayne S. Cole notes that many anti-Semites were encouraged by his comments. America. First (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953), p. 144.

⁴ H. Hoover to J. Scott, September 14, 1941, the Papers of Herbert Hoover, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.

⁵ C. Bowles to R. D. Stuart, Jr., July 15, 1941, the Papers of the America First Committee, Hoover Library of War, Peace, and Revolution, Palo Alto, California.

⁶ “Adventure in Honesty,” National Review, November 17, 1970, p. 1213.

⁷ Though Lindbergh has never regretted his militant non-interventionism, he did claim in May, 1945, that it was Hitler who “threw the human world into the greatest convulsion it has ever known” and whose plans had “brought such disaster to the world” (p. 949).